and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
Single player games putting out "seasonal content" is kind of obnoxious too though so I wouldn't exclude them all. One example is the Moogle Chocobo Carnival and Assassin's Festival in Final Fantasy XV which players had to work very hard to patch back into the game after it was removed. The limited time Stellar Blade Summer Event wasn't nearly as impressive as the carnival, but it was still a black mark on a game that was otherwise refreshingly free from bullshit.
Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly, but consumers should still be aware of the fact that their rights are limited. While the Gaben lives valve will store many people's games - when the Gaben dies... well, it's going to suck - but it'll probably take a while to completely suck, we'll probably go through drawn out enshittification first. This outcome seems inevitable[1] but it is likely a fair distance off.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
Companies selling these titles should know a minimum end date. Even if contracts don't get renewed, it's unlikely they will only have the rights for less than a year.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
> Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
If Valve continue to stay privately owned I've some confidence that the status quo will remain, regardless of whether Gaben's around. Enshittification is a feature of publicly traded companies and those owned by private equity.
It is. You can either be purchasing a license to a movie, or purchasing the movie itself. You have never been purchasing the movie itself from these services, because you're not entitled to it even after you purchase (i.e. there is DRM, etc. preventing you from ever getting it, you don't get it in any alternative forms, etc). If you want to own something, you buy on iTunes, where they let you download DRM-free copies, to do whatever you want with. But if you buy it on PlayStation, Amazon, etc. you are only getting a revocable license. You are only buying a revocable license. That is what "purchase" or "buy" means, because you're "purchasing" or "buying" the license, not the movie
Citizens don't need a license to read and/or watch stuff in their own private homes, that's a basic right guaranteed by the First Amendment (in the US; similar laws apply in the rest of the civilized world). Whatever you want to claim that people are purchasing it can not be a "viewing license" because that would violate the Constitution.
That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.
And if that one-time purchased software stops working at an arbitrary date, it should be subject to the same rules. Especially online software or software requiring servers to run.
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
Copyright law has been playing semantic games with "buy" and "own" for decades. When I buy(1) something, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. The person whom I buy it from doesn't have the right to rescind my rights over the thing I bought. When I buy(2) a software license, does the seller have the right to claw back the license? If not, then buy(1) and buy(2) are conceptually identical, and there's no difference between buying a license and buying the (copy of the) software. If yes or unknown, then buying(2) is not buying(1), as it does not grant ownership, but something else; not even over the license.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
Clearly, in Sony's case here it is buy(2), and they've reached into people's accounts and removed content (even using the term "purchased" in the notice email).
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
> it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when [...]
The use of "buy" and "purchase" were never restricted to ownership or unlimited rights, we buy licenses, usage rights, priority tokens, all sorts of lottery tickets and weirder abstractions every day.
GP probably wants digital movies to have a specific purchase model, but the discussion has to be about the model, not the vocabulary. Right now I actually have no idea what they'd be willing to accept as a middle ground to rights management.
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
> This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
Thing is, changing what the button says doesn't change the fine prints nor the central issues.
A ton of stores just moved away from the "buy" language and replaced the buttons with "order", "add to cart", "pay" etc. Stores like Amazon kept the "buy" button while expliciting it's for a license. All the whining on the meaning of buying just went into word tweaking with no further effects.
We need to talk about digital licenses, it's complex and there's no simple answer, but IMHO we first need to get past what the button says.
> You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
You bought a ticket that was advertised as a ticket for a concert and you got that. No one ever claimed or implied you were buying the musicians so they would perform the concert for you whenever you like.
When you 'buy' a movie in the way we are talking about here it is advertised and implied as buying the movie in the sense of owning a copy (or the right to access a copy) of the movie to watch whenever you want forever. What you get is more similar to an unlimited ticket to a cinema that allows you to watch that movie as long as it is shown in the cinema, but the cimema can decide to stop showing the movie any time. Unlike the concert ticket that is purposefully not clearly communicated (and the concert has a fixed service you purchase (one concert) unlike the movie ticket where the service you get is dependent entirely on the goodwill of the cinema)
I'd argue that it is not, especially regarding advertisement.
It could have been an expectation in the early DVD days, but at the time the Playstation Store started providing movies we were already deep into the digital store area, and we'd already had a bunch of "you own nothing" stories.
To my point the Kotaku title goes "_Reminding Us_ Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours", we've been through this many times now.
Yes, it is very comfusing. "Buy" buttons should be replaced by "License" buttons when you are licensing stuff instead of buyimg it. There should be a law for that.
Wow, "purchasing a revokable license" is an insane concept. Purchase of something revokable in general feels like... not purchasing? If there was a definite time bound that's one thing, but imagine if I sell a revokable license and then revoke it a week later -- it seems like that would be allowed?
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.
ISTM there's a good argument for a plaintiff to ask the court to ignore that on the basis that it's a contract of adhesion and one that's effectively unreadable for anyone without a law degree. We're not talking about terms and conditions that fit on a single sheet of paper in a normal font, bu thousands upon thousands of words.
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
None of the major movie/tv trackers have onerous ratio requirements. But yeah you don’t need them for new mainstream releases. They’re only necessary if you’re particular on quality or want niche stuff.
That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.
Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.
All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.
How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?
On most private trackers if you level up to Power User you unlock an invite forum where other trackers explicitly advertise with set requirements. No risky trading or begging, no need to participate in the forums at all, nobody “finds you”. You just send a dm once you meet the requirements.
Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.
I take advantage of AWS S3 for multimedia storage duty these days. My goal is to maintain stable access to content I enjoy without worrying about data loss or the burden of time it takes or maintain all the storage infrastructure.
If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.
Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.
There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.
I had to move, haven't settled yet, so my entire setup of Radarr/Sonarr/Kodi + torrent in a VPN container is gone and I miss it so much. The result is that I haven't been watching any movies or TV show for the past year or so. I miss them, but doing it legally or setting up something anew on a VPS is too much work or too much risky.
That said, wouldn't you have an invite for PassThePopcorn? Never heard of this one, I thought it was yet another iteration of that popcorn streaming app that was popular a decade ago. I always managed with public trackers, never cared about the entire interview process: I hate it for work, I hate it for fun even more. Email in the profile if you wish to share.
However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.
I’m still playing CDs from 1985 without any issue. And they often sound way nicer than overcompressed remasters I can find on Spotify. Would it be different with DVDs for a reason I ignore ?
If you buy a DVD you have the right, in every sane jurisdiction I'm aware of, to rip the movie from the DVD into an iso. You can then discard/recycle the media and retain the digital copy you have the right to view privately in perpetuity. It is a single consumer license though, as is logical, so it's likely illegal for you to continue to watch the ripped iso if you resell the media with the content still on it or resell the media with any portion of the value coming from the markings from the content or the fact that it used to contain that content. You probably want to shove it in a closet somewhere or just reuse it as rewriteable media for whatever purpose you need - retaining physical ownership of the media makes things simplest legally.
DRM is like a vibe, man - if you have the ability to output a video stream to an arbitrary display device you can always bypass DRM and it's never been illegal[1] to do so (though publishing approaches to defeat it often is).
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Gosh, I didn't know the DMCA went that far. I had assumed it was in line with Canada's TPM related laws which do disallow direct circumvention of DRM but do specifically except format shifting if the copy will be used for a legal purpose. I guess be careful and check your local jurisdiction.
The US Library of Congress is given a Special Exemption in the DMCA [1] and so far the Library has been using it to grant a Backup Exemption that format shifting is legal for backups. Due to the nature of this exemption it has to be debated and reviewed every 3 years, so it's in a weird legal status if it "will always" be around.
In Finland DVD's CSS was ruled to be strong technical copy protection system (tehokas tekninen toimenpide). In that exact case a person had made a program which bypassed it and published it. He was found to be criminally liable though he didn't get any fine/prison time from what I remember.
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Shoutout to DVD-Jon from Norway.[1] I'm pretty sure we've settled on it being legal nowadays, but it took at least that court case for it to happen (not to mention that it was a fucking clown show).
There's a quote on his Norwegian Wikipedia page from the then minister of justice: 'Some people may think [circumventing DVD DRM] is cool and stuff, but this is an activity that is devastating for the industry'.
If it really is devastating for the industry, the industry should really figure itself out. And for that matter, with hindsight, it doesn't look like it really did anything.
Finnish case happened after DVD-Jon. To my knowledge there also hasn't been any new cases which went other way (or any way) in Finland & law hasn't changed so it's technically still illegal. Of course it's up to prosecutor to determine if they want to actually go ahead with prosecution & it's also not a crime which gets discovered often so the risks are quite low, especially if you are just ripping DVDs for personal use.
everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.
For streaming yes, but downloads are still copyright infringement on the part of the downloader. An unauthorized copy is being made on the recipient's machine. It's true that copyright holders rarely pursue cases against individuals, and tend to focus on distributors though.
Have there been any cases since the Meta ruling with the books they torrented? If I understood it right they argued and won that they didn’t seed any of the torrents so is fair use and the judge agreed. That case made it seem like as long as you don’t seed/distribute the copyrighted material then it is legal
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
streaming is downloading, otherwise it wouldnt be visible on your hardware.
if you pay for a stream and the distributor downloads it to your buffer, the only thing preventing it from persisting is wrapping the data to contain it in a file structure. if we really want to split hairs, everytime the data is accessed a streams bits are copied into registers, but those bits have no identity beyond 1 or 0
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
The argument is that it doesn't create another copy, so it's more analogous to receiving a broadcast. Like, if a pirate radio station plays copyrighted music, then the mere act of receiving those signals isn't a copyright violation. But recording that broadcast would be.
Is this seriously true in the US? I doubt this is the case in any European jurisdiction.
Recording radio and TV is legal in any other case (the relevant companies didn't want that to be the case either, but we hadn't yet fallen far enough down the hole yet for that possibility to disappear).
To make another comparison:
You record House on your Tivo = Legal (you now have a file you can play anywhere (barring DRM, but libre DVRs exist), you've copied it)
You 'record' House on Netflix (either literally with OBS or just capturing the video stream via some other means) = Illegal
The only difference is the source. The actual video stream could be functionally identical. There's the fact that actual TV and radio isn't on-demand, but that to me is just an implementation detail, and not an inherent reason to treat them differently (then again, I'm not deep into the mindset of defending copyright).
the thing is its not like a radio or TV broadcast. some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public, you just cant sell it like its yours.
when a server downloads data to you, the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
appending header and footer to a data structure is not copying the data.
the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else. [dont do that]
> some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public
I can still legally record cable TV (or is that also illegal in the US?), even though I probably need to pay a lot more for it than I would for both Netflix and open broadcasts.
> when a server downloads data to you,
*Uploads.
> the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
As opposed to what?
> a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
The same way a TV broadcast is (barring implementation details). What's the difference between me displaying that data instantly and it then going to /dev/null, and me sending that to copy.mkv? I can do the latter legally with TV, why not everything else?
tv-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
tv-Stream.ts > copy.mkv = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > copy.mkv = Illegal (why?)
> restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
Yes.
> the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else.
Obviously. But I'm not doing that when recording TV, radio, Netflix, a blu-ray, your mum, you name it. I'm only making a copy for myself. Yet it's legal in some cases but not in others, just because the implementation is different.
it's all just silly semantics but even under the highly specific definition in the article I would say water is wet.
the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
On the topic of silly semantics, science as a discipline has the tendency to paint itself into linguistic paradoxes where the words does not mean what it means.
An example is "bug" where there is a (sighs) true bug(a very specific type of insect) But the one that really bothers me is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is the origin of the term, it literally means hanging stone. but... they started cataloging other similar circle-of-stone type monuments and calling them henges, a henge got defined to be more specifically a circle of stones with an inner ditch. But Stonehenge has an outer ditch.... So Stonehenge is not a henge... (Sighs again).
> the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
I disagree with your interpretation as that is using "wet" as a verb i.e. water can wet a surface.
I had no idea about the Stonehenge misnomer - I shall attempt to wrangle that into future conversations as I have some friends that are into ancient history/geology.
My favourite naming oddities are usually around fruits and nuts - a banana is a berry, but a strawberry isn't and of course, a brazil nut isn't a nut at all.
I believe this is the current situation in switzerland, plus, the swiss have a tv license you have to pay if you have anything that could show media digitally so i feel doubly justified pirating things.
copyright infringement is not theft, it is also not piracy.
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
This discussion applies to any product from every virtual store, including game stores.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
>I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not.
You also get the play the same version stored on DVD regardless where you are. You are limited by location when you purchase it online, and sometimes they might even automatically swap the version / cuts for you depending on your location.
We really need a storage media that last 100+ years, store 200GB+, tiny footprint, and inexpensive to produce.
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
"Verb
"purchase (third-person singular simple present purchases, present participle purchasing, simple past and past participle purchased)
"To buy, obtain by payment of a price in money or its equivalent."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase
"Verb
"buy (third-person singular simple present buys, present participle buying, simple past bought, past participle bought or (archaic, rare, dialectal) boughten)
"(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buy#English
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
> it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when [...]
The use of "buy" and "purchase" were never restricted to ownership or unlimited rights, we buy licenses, usage rights, priority tokens, all sorts of lottery tickets and weirder abstractions every day.
GP probably wants digital movies to have a specific purchase model, but the discussion has to be about the model, not the vocabulary. Right now I actually have no idea what they'd be willing to accept as a middle ground to rights management.
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
What a great argument.
To people, "buy" when in the context of a movie largely means owning the freaking thing.
> we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
That's normalization of deviance. It's fine if you're fine with that scam, don't come onto people who aren't.
A ton of stores just moved away from the "buy" language and replaced the buttons with "order", "add to cart", "pay" etc. Stores like Amazon kept the "buy" button while expliciting it's for a license. All the whining on the meaning of buying just went into word tweaking with no further effects.
We need to talk about digital licenses, it's complex and there's no simple answer, but IMHO we first need to get past what the button says.
You bought a ticket that was advertised as a ticket for a concert and you got that. No one ever claimed or implied you were buying the musicians so they would perform the concert for you whenever you like.
When you 'buy' a movie in the way we are talking about here it is advertised and implied as buying the movie in the sense of owning a copy (or the right to access a copy) of the movie to watch whenever you want forever. What you get is more similar to an unlimited ticket to a cinema that allows you to watch that movie as long as it is shown in the cinema, but the cimema can decide to stop showing the movie any time. Unlike the concert ticket that is purposefully not clearly communicated (and the concert has a fixed service you purchase (one concert) unlike the movie ticket where the service you get is dependent entirely on the goodwill of the cinema)
I'd argue that it is not, especially regarding advertisement.
It could have been an expectation in the early DVD days, but at the time the Playstation Store started providing movies we were already deep into the digital store area, and we'd already had a bunch of "you own nothing" stories.
To my point the Kotaku title goes "_Reminding Us_ Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours", we've been through this many times now.
And people wonder why some people sail the high seas.
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Tech EULAs are just absurdly long, and I'm sure they've expanded since this article was written in 2020: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
In fact, for those things, I'd say a private tracker isn't that interesting because of the share requirements.
That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.
Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.
If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.
Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.
There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.
That said, wouldn't you have an invite for PassThePopcorn? Never heard of this one, I thought it was yet another iteration of that popcorn streaming app that was popular a decade ago. I always managed with public trackers, never cared about the entire interview process: I hate it for work, I hate it for fun even more. Email in the profile if you wish to share.
If I am the reason for damaging my purchase then I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase.
Same happens with books, you buy the copy and if you don't take care of it, soon it will become unreadable.
I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase, I am not fine when my purchase can be taken away from me abruptly by the decision of random Joe
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
[1] (a)1(C) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Unfortunately I cannot find the exact page right now, but I found one of the appeal documents from from https://www.yumpu.com/fi/document/view/38482300/1-helsingin-.... It's probably under https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikki/, but it's no longer available and Internet Archive is currently giving 503 when trying to access the old pages.
There's a quote on his Norwegian Wikipedia page from the then minister of justice: 'Some people may think [circumventing DVD DRM] is cool and stuff, but this is an activity that is devastating for the industry'.
If it really is devastating for the industry, the industry should really figure itself out. And for that matter, with hindsight, it doesn't look like it really did anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
Both uploading and downloading is a violation. All the major cases are against distributors, because those are the big fish. But rights holders have gone after individuals: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/lit...
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
Is this seriously true in the US? I doubt this is the case in any European jurisdiction.
Recording radio and TV is legal in any other case (the relevant companies didn't want that to be the case either, but we hadn't yet fallen far enough down the hole yet for that possibility to disappear).
To make another comparison:
You record House on your Tivo = Legal (you now have a file you can play anywhere (barring DRM, but libre DVRs exist), you've copied it)
You 'record' House on Netflix (either literally with OBS or just capturing the video stream via some other means) = Illegal
The only difference is the source. The actual video stream could be functionally identical. There's the fact that actual TV and radio isn't on-demand, but that to me is just an implementation detail, and not an inherent reason to treat them differently (then again, I'm not deep into the mindset of defending copyright).
when a server downloads data to you, the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
appending header and footer to a data structure is not copying the data.
the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else. [dont do that]
I can still legally record cable TV (or is that also illegal in the US?), even though I probably need to pay a lot more for it than I would for both Netflix and open broadcasts.
> when a server downloads data to you,
*Uploads.
> the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
As opposed to what?
> a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
The same way a TV broadcast is (barring implementation details). What's the difference between me displaying that data instantly and it then going to /dev/null, and me sending that to copy.mkv? I can do the latter legally with TV, why not everything else?
tv-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
tv-Stream.ts > copy.mkv = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > copy.mkv = Illegal (why?)
> restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
Yes.
> the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else.
Obviously. But I'm not doing that when recording TV, radio, Netflix, a blu-ray, your mum, you name it. I'm only making a copy for myself. Yet it's legal in some cases but not in others, just because the implementation is different.
"Asking a computer to not copy things is like asking water to not be wet."
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet
the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
On the topic of silly semantics, science as a discipline has the tendency to paint itself into linguistic paradoxes where the words does not mean what it means.
An example is "bug" where there is a (sighs) true bug(a very specific type of insect) But the one that really bothers me is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is the origin of the term, it literally means hanging stone. but... they started cataloging other similar circle-of-stone type monuments and calling them henges, a henge got defined to be more specifically a circle of stones with an inner ditch. But Stonehenge has an outer ditch.... So Stonehenge is not a henge... (Sighs again).
I disagree with your interpretation as that is using "wet" as a verb i.e. water can wet a surface.
I had no idea about the Stonehenge misnomer - I shall attempt to wrangle that into future conversations as I have some friends that are into ancient history/geology.
My favourite naming oddities are usually around fruits and nuts - a banana is a berry, but a strawberry isn't and of course, a brazil nut isn't a nut at all.
"You wouldn't still a car" etc etc..
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
There, FTFY.
It's almost already like this. Buying a movie is sometimes the exact same price or only a dollar more. They know what they're doing.
Initially, the new button might say "buy license" and then eventually it will go back to just "buy".
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
Edit: clarification
You also get the play the same version stored on DVD regardless where you are. You are limited by location when you purchase it online, and sometimes they might even automatically swap the version / cuts for you depending on your location.
We really need a storage media that last 100+ years, store 200GB+, tiny footprint, and inexpensive to produce.
[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony%27s_attempted_removal_of_...
https://filmstories.co.uk/news/funimation-streaming-app-to-s...
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
I stuck to buying hard copies and dwindled off the series as they started to charge just to play multiplayer.